Everyone in the local news media is talking about the fallout from the Engardio recall. Some of them get the point, mostly: This is about more than the Great Highway, and it could mark the recreation of a powerful alliance that once passed the city’s premier development-control measure and got the last real progressive, Art Agnos, elected mayor.
In the early 1980s, land-use politics (and much of San Francisco is about land use) was “downtown against the neighborhoods.” Office developers were making massive fortunes building highrises in the Financial District, and then Soma (destroying blue-collar industry), and with a compliant mayor and Board of Supes, they were starting to eye residential areas. They wanted to turn San Francisco into Manhattan.
This was never about housing, no matter how the Yimby historians want to play it. Back then, nobody was building housing, because profits were higher in offices. (That, for the record, is how capitalism works.) Progressives were demanding, not opposing, new housing; one line I heard a lot was “if you create a job, you need to build a housing unit.” The Office Housing Production Program, entirely a progressive idea, mandated that developers who were bringing new workers to the city build housing for them; Mayor Dianne Feinstein opposed it, and anything else that would undermine developer profits.
After two attempts at limiting office growth through ballot measures, which almost passed, City Hall got the message, and reduced height limits in a lot of residential neighborhoods. Again: Not about housing. Not about Nimbyism. It was about preventing office creep, preventing “Manhattanization.”
There were, of course, some people who wanted to defend single-family housing on the West Side of town. But the bigger issue was growth in general: The city was growing too fast, with too much new population (to work in those highrise offices) and not enough infrastructure (or housing) to support that growth.
The downzoning was supposed to buy off neighborhood opposition to office growth. It didn’t. By 1986, fed up with paying the price on the city of developer profits, a coalition of voters passed Prop. M, which strictly limited the amount of new office space. (It probably saved the local economy; when the S&L crisis happened in the late 1980s, cities with overbuilt office space, all heavily leveraged, faced collapse).
The coalition that passed Prop. M, and a year later elected one of the few public officials to support the measure (Agnos), was made up of progressives on the East Side of town—and more conservative neighborhood activists on the West Side. Agnos won the Chinese vote over John Molinari, a West Side guy, native San Franciscan—and widely known ally of the big developers.
The Engardio recall suggests that voters in the conservative areas are unhappy with the way the new “moderate” majority at City Hall is treating them. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who won with those West Side votes and who stayed out of the recall, seemed to acknowledge that in a statement:
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
As I campaigned for mayor last year, I heard countless west side families say what San Franciscans have been feeling for years: that their government is doing things to them, not with them, and that government is not working to make their lives better.
As votes are still being counted and the election will be certified in the coming weeks, our team is evaluating next steps for the District Four supervisor seat.
In other words: I don’t want to offend the voters who put me on office.
But there’s a problem, because now it’s all about housing—and just as Feinstein did whatever office developers wanted, Lurie and the current majority on the Board of Supes are doing whatever market-rate housing developers want.
The Big Lie of the office boom, and then later the tech boom, was that development and tech was “creating jobs.” It was: For mostly white, mostly male, people with finance or computer science degrees, who moved here from somewhere else to take those jobs. For the existing residents, particularly Black and Latino residents without college degrees, there were no decent jobs—just displacement.
The Big Lie about Lurie’s housing plan (and State Sen. Scott Wiener’s entire approach to housing) is that more market-rate housing will bring prices down for “families.” For existing working-class families, particularly renters, on the West Side of town, the new luxury housing will mean nothing but displacement.
One of the axioms of progressive urban planning is: First, stabilize existing vulnerable communities. Lurie’s plan does nothing of the sort.
Same goes for small businesses, which will bear the brunt of new housing development.
It’s interesting to see David Ho, who has mostly worked for more “moderate” candidates and causes, saying this:
(Engardio’s) evolution to this white urbanist agenda, aligned with YIMBYs, is out of touch with the majority of the D4 constituency,” said David Ho, a progressive political consultant and Chinatown organizer, referring to how leadership of such groups tends to be white.
Ho is not a “progressive” consultant. In fact, he’s often attacked progressives, including me. But it’s true that a lot of the pro-tech, pro-late-stage-capitalist fans of more market-rate housing are younger and richer and whiter than the communities they could be damaging. There is a lot of elitism in the Yimby “urbanist” movement, and there always has been, going back to Richard Florida.
Wiener and his allies, including Engardio, talk about how cities have to change, how San Francisco can’t be set in amber. That’s fair—but when cities change, the people who have lived here for decades and the legacy businesses that anchor communities shouldn’t be forced to leave so people with more money can take their place.
The Yimby, Wiener, and Lurie argument is that more market-rate housing will solve the problem, by giving the new rich people a place to live. If that were true, Vancouver BC would be the most affordable city in North America. It’s the least affordable—after doing what the Yimbys wanted for decades.
I don’t know if the post-Engardio politics can spark some discussion about economic inequality (the real source of the housing crisis), class issues, and the future of the city. But there’s an opening.
